First Impressions: Lost and Found by Buzz Zeemer

Strong thunderstorms are pushing through the Triangle as I write, with waves of heavy rain hitting my specific slice of paradise. Slow-rolling booms crackle overhead like a stylus treading along the grooves of a dirty LP, while water bullets from heaven drench the bunnies, deer and people who dare to tread across the communal green. 

It’s an odd thing, looking out the window of my home office. A part of me half-expects to see the tree adjacent to the den window in the suburban Philadelphia apartment that Diane and I called home for almost 24 years. That room was overstuffed with books, CDs and furniture, with barely enough space for a hand-me-down computer desk and an ugly orange chair that I salvaged from the Cable Guide office. It was there, over the course of the 1990s, that I wrote (and never finished) my Great American Novel—in retrospect, little more than a rehash of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams—and, from 1997 through 2006, oversaw the original Old Grey Cat website.

I’ve recycled a handful of posts from that original site since moving this blog from the Hatboro-Horsham Patch to wordpress.com in 2014. Some missives, such as my interviews with David Crosby, were solid. Much more was dreck. Whenever I access the site’s archives, which isn’t often, I’m shocked at the misspellings that slipped through and, most of all, the overuse of ellipses…and the profanity. Oh, the profanity!

That may seem like an odd way to start a review ostensibly about Buzz Zeemer’s Lost and Found, a collection of tracks that slipped through the cracks back in the 1990s, but there’s this: At its best, at least as I experience it, music simultaneously extricates us from and takes us further within ourselves. (It’s a yin-yang thing.) Too, unlike my novel, the 14 songs here are imbued with a joie de vivre that’s simply contagious. They’re raw and ragged, at times akin to a poppier Crazy Horse, with loud guitars, cymbal crashes, and Frank Brown’s emotive vocals complementing not just each other, but the songs. They deserve to be heard.

It’s ragged glory at its best, isn’t it? 

The songs echo the concerns many of a certain vintage will remember having during the 1990s, aka our mid-20s through our mid-30s, from relationship hurdles to self-doubt to concerns about the future, with sly humor coloring many of the compositions. As Brown admits in “C’mon If You Can,” “I don’t need a plan/but I could use a clue.” Adroit character studies accent other songs, such as “Happy Hour” and “Shelly Don’t Mind,” while questions of the ages haunt others (“Answer My Prayers”). Plaintive confessions of the heart are on hand, too, in the bittersweet “These Things,” as is advice to a heartbroken pal (“You’ll Do Better”).

According to the Bandcamp notes, the recordings hail from a time (1993 to ’97) when Flight of Mavis (Brown on guitar and vocals, Ken Buono on drums, and Dave McElroy on bass) was evolving into Buzz Zeemer due to Philly guitar legend Tommy Conwell joining the fold; when it came time to release albums (1996’s Play Thing and 1997’s Delusions of Grandeur), the new trumped the old—as it often does. Only two (“Don’t Hang Up” and “Lost and Found”) were released. But make no mistake, the songs are anything but cast-offs. 

It’s still confounding to me that Buzz Zeemer never vaulted from the Philly club scene to the national stage. Lost and Found likely won’t change that, of course, but it should (hopefully) cement their reputation as one of the best purveyors of power pop during the ‘90s.